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From the awkwardness of shyness to the extreme anxiety of terror, all fear is essentially the same.

Wild animals instinctively assess their position whenever they encounter an unknown or dangerous situation. Likewise we, as humans, instantaneously assess for a fight or flight response and our fear can either freeze us in terror or cause courage to emerge.

For many of us the lingering memories of childhood experiences set off alarms when we’re faced with threatening circumstances. Many of us were bullied, abused or continually cautioned with negatives like: “Don’t…! ” or “You’ll never…!” Such phrases seem to crop up whenever we’re faced with challenges to our wellbeing.

As a consequence, the negative memories stored over time at the physical, mental and higher levels contribute to self-doubt and indecisiveness. These limitations on our ability to adapt healthfully to change inhibit us from reaching our full potential.

On top of the physical and mental effects of fear, spiritual negativity is attracted during distressing situations and we carry that accumulation into adulthood. Fearful events often cause a child to open up to one or more negatively oriented spirits that remain with them throughout their lifetime.

Fear is the greatest of negative tools, and built up spiritual negativity amplifies the effect of past memories and the perceived threat of a challenging situation. Fear can be real or imagined and sensible solutions are best prompted when we’re steadily cool, calm and collected.

Last summer, I was confronted with what might have been an alarming experience in a grocery store parking lot, but my ongoing work with my spirit proved very effective. A woman’s plastic shoe became stuck under the accelerator of her SUV, causing her to race toward me with such force that she ran into another SUV and that vehicle struck another. The SUV missed me by only a few inches, yet I maintained my presence of mind, called 911 and headed home, remarkably composed.

Because I know how to work with my spirit, I automatically refused the perceived negativity as soon as I heard the screeching sound of the driver spinning her tires. So my spirit and I were already counteracting the wave of negative energy directed toward me before the SUV sped past just behind me.

Goose Spit, Vancouver Is. Canada~Photo by M. Barclay

The more higher-level awareness you acquire, the better prepared you’ll be when fear strikes. Instead of allowing the onset of bodily chemical processes to further complicate your response to simple stressful situations or major catastrophic events, your higher self and spirit can help you to go forward in confidence.

By going within to work with your spirit, you’ll take charge of all aspects of your being and bring your spiritual knowledge into play. You’ll be more composed to better assess fear-triggering situations so you’re prepared to respond rationally.

Getting rid of fear and self-doubt are only part of what working with your spirit can add to your life…just imagine how strong and confident you’ll become as you progress!

Some of us think that our lives are destined to be mediocre, that we have no power to bring ourselves into a level of being that makes us feel more competent, complete and appreciated.

Why do we feel like we’re lost in our everyday struggles, oblivious to the parts of ourselves that could be helpful? We just sort of amble along, hoping that something will miraculously change and bring us the kind of dynamic life that we think we’re craving. If that sounds like you, then you’re ready to stir up some changes in your life!

Years ago when I was worrying and feeling helpless about my life, I started looking for something that would create changes at a level that weren’t addressed by traditional remedies. When I found out about working with my spirit and the Light*, I suddenly became invigorated with the possibilities that my life actually presented.

When you choose to open a positive pathway into your higher-level capabilities, you’ll become more aware of the factors that block access to your inherent talents. A great deal of the interference that diminishes your self-esteem and creativity originates at the higher level of your being.

What if you’ve been creating the higher-level factors that contribute to such interference because you’ve been accepting and reinforcing your own negative conceptions about yourself? What if you’ve been creating and attracting additional negativity because of those thoughts? Is it possible that other people pick up on your lack of confidence and low self-esteem, in the same way that you pick up on the over-inflated attitudes of some very self-absorbed people? One thing’s for certain: You’re never going to please everyone all the time, and you have to accept that as part of being human.

At one time I was shy and afraid of what others might think of me but, once I started to work with my spirit, my self-perspective changed. I always learn from my interactions with others, whether their opinion appears important or not.

The other day, while I was out for a walk, I stopped to greet a dog on a leash that came running up to me. The owner immediately started to apologize for her pet, but I assured her that I always welcome such greetings. The owner told me that her dog never stops to greet anyone, ever. I considered it a compliment to have such a discerning animal set me apart for a greeting, as though it was her acknowledgment of my harmony within.

How can you begin to accept yourself the way you are, so that you can feel comfortable about being the person you truly are inside? That’s what self esteem’s all about! When you start to love yourself and believe in yourself, you’ll suddenly realize your positive qualities and allow them to flow outward into the world.

As you look at yourself from a positive perspective, accept yourself, then thank yourself and take it from there!

Isn’t it great that there’s such a thing as Prevent Child Abuse Awareness Month? As more adults become aware that children are forced to hide, cover up and keep secret their abuse, hopefully many more children will be able to trust and be given the help they need to end their suffering.

As a survivor of childhood abuse myself, I became so much more aware of its pervasiveness through my spiritual/natural/quantum healing work. While shocking and sad at the same time, the plight of an innocent 2-year-old girl especially brought home the treachery. Her parents had brought her to see Leo and me because she refused to eat and had stopped talking. As a first step we helped her to start working with her spirit and then turned to her parents to ask what the circumstances were at home. Both parents worked so, while the mother worked part-time in the morning, her brother-in-law stayed home with their daughter. As we continued to find out more about the little girl’s withdrawal and self-destructive behavior, to the surprise of the young parents it became evident that their daughter’s change had coincided with the arrival of the brother-in-law in their household a few weeks earlier. After the brother-in-law was removed from their home, the little girl started talking again and was eating normally.

However, several months later we received a visit from the family again, after they had been overseas visiting with relatives and the little girl was refusing to talk and eat again. After reconnecting her with her spirit and while the parents assured Leo that they had watched closely over their daughter during their trip, I intuitively took the little girl into another room where we sat quietly looking at pictures in a National Geographic magazine. The little girl was quite relaxed with me until I opened one page where there was a photo of an older man sitting on a porch in a rocking chair. She started yelling and poked and hit at the picture, with tears welling up in her eyes.

I quickly took the little girl back into the room where her parents were. When I showed them the picture that made the little girl so angry, her mother said that it looked just like one of their relatives that they had been visiting. As the parents searched their memory about the man’s interaction with their daughter, they remembered one afternoon when she had been napping and the man had been upstairs alone with her. Once again, the poor little darling had suffered another abuse event while among the very people she should have been able to trust most.

Not only do children suffer physically, mentally and emotionally from abuse, they suffer spiritually at the highest level of their being. Abuse cuts children off from the inherent protection afforded by their spirit.

Most often when a child encounters abuse, the spirit they have always known will exit their body and will not return, because a negatively oriented spirit will take over. Without the relationship with their spirit that they have always known, a child feels cut off from their essential self that would otherwise help them to navigate through their life. Some children are stronger and adapt more readily than others, but too many are left without their basic defense mechanism. Giving a child back their original spirit or a positively oriented spirit has such amazing results! They’re able to once again find balance within themselves, but still need help to end the abuse at the physical level.

Child abuse is rampant throughout the world, one of the main reasons why I refer to it as a negative planet. Protecting children at all levels is essential to give them the safety and security that allows them to focus on the positive aspects of their lives. Unfortunately, parents often find it hard to prevent their child from being vulnerable to abuse, especially if they’ve been the victims of abuse in their own childhood.

In an ideal world, no child would ever be abused but, in our reality, a child should at the very least never be left in vulnerable circumstances physically or spiritually.

The importance of self-forgiveness for survivors of childhood sexual abuse

Someone commented the other day that the hardest thing for her to do was to forgive herself. For those of us that were sexually abused as children, we bear the detrimental memories of those incomprehensible moments into adulthood. The negative memories and emotions build inside until they begin to manifest in ways that cause emotional, mental and physical illness. When I learned how to stop the momentum of the shame and guilt caused by early abuse events, I eventually emerged as the healthy balanced person I am today.

When I was really young, I really didn’t even understand what was happening to me, or that it was anything unusual, because I believe that I had been conditioned from a very early age to accept sexual abuse as a normal occurrence. After trying to report to my mother what had happened to me on one occasion and wasn’t believed, then being threatened into silence another time, I quickly learned that I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. I continued to keep all of it a secret.

By the time I reached puberty, I was being molested by people close to me. I was so shy that I had trouble expressing any romantic interests with boys my own age, so I never had any meaningful relationships. When I had what I thought was my first sexual encounter at age 16, I was humiliated when the 21-year-old man practically laughed out loud because I had told him that I was a virgin. After that incident I was accosted and raped by several older teenagers. What I never realized throughout any of this was that all this was happening because I had been abused as a young child. It just never connected. I never knew how to fight back to stop the abuse and was still afraid to tell others, for fear of not being believed or being ostracized for being a victim.

Soon after these events, I moved away to try and start a new life. Within me was the inkling of knowledge that I would one day find harmony in my life. But there seemed to be no way to stop the pattern of abuse that I had accepted. By my mid-20’s I had become a battered woman as my life kept spiraling downward. When I reached a crisis point, I finally looked for and found help from someone who made me look at myself in a whole new perspective.

At that point I was in a similar position as the lady that prompted me to post this today. Years ago, when it was suggested that I should forgive myself, it seemed almost impossible. My approach was to review the different aspects of how the abuse had affected me. I realized that I felt great shame, loss of dignity and very little self-esteem. My shyness and lack of confidence had prevented me from having meaningful relationships. Somehow, I even felt guilty because I had allowed the abuse to continue until it was life threatening. I had to reconcile with myself in order to remove those destructive emotional memories from my being.

In order to begin to forgive myself, I had to acknowledge that I was unique, that I had purpose and that I was worthy of happiness. And I had to believe it. Then I could forgive myself for having accepted the abuse, even though I really couldn’t have prevented it as a very young child. The best way for me to fight back against that breach of my free will was to believe that I could become the person that I truly am inside, and to eliminate the fear, guilt and other negative emotions that lingered from the abuse events and their aftermath.

Once I was able to accept myself as I was at that moment, it began a ripple effect. I was then able to forgive myself, and that enabled me to start loving myself. That’s when I accepted that I could interact with my spirit (soul) and started to work with it. I have regained my dignity and, when I look in the mirror, I see my inner beauty reflected back.

I still continue to forgive myself whenever I think, react or behave in ways that trouble me, in order to create a fresh starting point that allows me to once again move forward in a positive direction.

For most of my life I’ve quietly been a non-believer and it always amazes me how adults continue to believe in the creation and other stories that their religions narrate. While I still respect the choice that religious people make to believe in something as intangible, abstract and incredible as an omnipotent being that created everything from scratch, it would be less farfetched to worship the big bang. However, when you think about how children are conditioned and encouraged in very clever ways to follow the footsteps of their parents or government into a given religion, it’s not hard to understand why religious beliefs are so embedded into the minds of almost all human beings.

Recently a client mentioned to me how fortunate she felt because she had never been indoctrinated into any religious belief system as a child. I felt so pleased for her, because she had never been forced to participate in such an incarceration of the mind. I reflected on my own catholic upbringing that was filled with conditioning by experts. My earliest memory of being punished was when I was three years old. I had just returned from having attended church for the first time without my mother. Our neighbor, a staunch religious woman, had caught me “sweeping the floor” with my nose, and advised my mother to punish me immediately with a spanking. My mother questioned this advice but, because she was being pressured by one of her peers, duly spanked me for my irreverence. Even though I protested that all I had been doing was counting the boots of the people in the row in front of us!

After learning that I was to do everything exactly as everyone else did while in the house of cards, I became an observer. I used to watch everyone as they entered the church: walking up to the basin of holy water, dipping their finger in and genuflecting down on one knee as they crossed themselves with the blessed liquid. Everyone was so serious, all dressed up in their finery. If a young girl forgot to wear a hat or scarf over her head, a helpful mother would kindly provide her with a Kleenex and bobby pin to ensure her respectful appearance.

One Sunday there was an unexpected transition from the normal solemn mood of the mass. The organist, who happened to have been my first grade teacher, suddenly stood up while playing one of the livelier tunes that she usually played with such reverence. As she stood up, she looked around as though she was expecting everyone’s admiration. My mother who led the choir looked at her with some surprise. As the weeks went by, the organist continued to stand, then even smile and move in rhythm with the music as the pressure for attention mounted. To everyone’s relief, the poor woman was soon replaced, so that the somber monotony could resume.

It was around that time, when I was about 12 years old, that my mother announced that I was going to be able to take piano lessons. I was ecstatic at the prospect of finally learning to play the big old upright that stood in our dining room. Some of my older five sisters had started lessons, but never seemed to stay with it. For two and a half years, I was the happiest person around. I practiced piano every day before dinner, but was among the shiest of all pianists. When my mother brought company over and asked me to play, I would agree only if they all sat in the other room. I was so happy that I didn’t have to take lessons at the convent, where tales of yardsticks as weapons were wielded on faulty fingers. When I won first place at a regional piano competition, I was both proud and relieved because they had allowed me to focus while I played facing a wall.

However, soon my musical elation would be thoroughly quashed as religion interfered. One day as I was getting money for the bus to go to my weekly lesson, my mother mentioned that I could soon start learning to play the organ at the church. I looked at her with incredulity. My immediate response was: “Then I’ll quit!” To which my mother responded: “You’ll regret it!” I felt threatened and came back with: “I might regret it, but I’ll never play the organ at church!” I knew only too well how many hours had to be spent playing at the church while the choir practiced. And who would always be popping in to see the ladies but the depraved priest that had raped me a few years earlier! Even more troubling was when the priest accepted my mother’s invitation to dinner that Easter. It was difficult to sit across the table from that man, knowing that he was held under such esteem by my mother, while I was still under his threat not to tell or my family would be punished.

Although music and religion have intertwined since ancient times, from when temples were built to maximize the impact of sounds and song to when many musical artists attribute their talents to early song worship, religion always strikes a sour chord for me. It brought me nothing but grief as a child and continuously presents divisiveness on our planet. In a world where freedom is of concern to us all, what about the religious freedom of children? Despite all the physical and psychological efforts by the religious conditioners in my early life, I’m glad that I was able to see through the hypocrisy and rationally decide for myself about the notion of God.

On the positive side, my experience set me on a spiritual search for meaning in my life. It wasn’t until I started working with my spirit that I finally understood that the ultimate goal of every human should be to personally attain harmony with their spirit.

My life changed significantly when I learned to work with my spirit over 25 years ago, and I could then view my existence in a whole new perspective. Perhaps my story will inspire you to work with your spirit as you search for meaning in your life.

Ever since I was a young child I pondered the reason for my existence. How did we come to be on this planet and for what purpose are we here? Burdened with a childhood steeped in deep religious doctrine, I began to break away at the age of 8, at least in my thoughts, from the notion that God was the most important factor in my life. It was at that time that I remember lying in bed and saying to myself: “I’m not worthy to be married to God.” I had just decided that I didn’t want to be a nun, as my mother had been nurturing me to be up to that point.

It wasn’t the first time that I had questioned catholic doctrine as a child, like in the first grade. My teacher was telling my class all about how our religion doesn’t worship pagan gods, statues or idols. I put up my hand and asked the legitimate question: “But what about all the statues in our church?” That question met with firm facial disapproval by the teacher, as she quickly changed the subject.

Later on in 1966, at the age of 10, I was still trying to meet the standards that every “good” catholic girl is supposed to strive for. I had excelled in my catholic studies and was already “confirmed” by the bishop. In the spring I volunteered to teach religious doctrine by introducing the catechism to 1st grade catholic children who were attending the local protestant school. Two other students had also volunteered and we met in the church basement on Wednesdays after school. After our class on the third week, I decided to show my fellow instructors how to make prank calls on the phone in the basement kitchen, like one of my sisters had done a few days earlier. We were laughing away at one of the calls, when a voice came on the phone, obviously the priest who had picked up the receiver upstairs, telling us to stay right were we were.

An endless minute later, Father LeFaive came charging down an interior stairway (that I never knew existed) and broke open the door. He was livid with anger, asking who was responsible for talking on his phone. Being the ultimate honest child, I admitted my guilt and the priest told the other children to go home. He pointed to a tray of plastic glasses on the counter of the kitchen, and ordered me to bring it upstairs for him. I climbed the stairs with the tray of plastic glasses with such fear of punishment that I could barely breathe. I knew that I was in deep trouble when the priest told my mother what I had done.

To my surprise, when we entered the upstairs doorway, we entered into the priest’s kitchen, not into the church itself. My heart was pounding with fear by then, as the good father told me to put the tray down on the counter. Then he told me to go through the archway leading into the hallway but, instead of turning right and going into the vestry, he pointed over my shoulder to go through the doorway straight ahead. As I entered the room I saw that it was the priest’s bedroom. The bed was immediately to my left, while I remember looking at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I wondered what he was going to do, as I watched him in the mirror.

Well, it didn’t take but a few seconds upon entering the room, when Father LeFaive told me to lie down on the bed. Of course, I did so immediately. He was, after all, my priest. I saw him undoing his belt, and so I thought that he was going to beat me. However, as I was entering a state of panic, he told me to close my eyes and go to sleep. I remember peaking through my almost-closed eyelids as I watched the priest and I went into some sort of altered state as I left my body to the sexual punishment meted out by that sick man of god (I omitted the capitalization on purpose). When I returned to consciousness, my clothes were back on and we were in the vestry. Father LeFaive looked me square in the eyes and said to me, in no uncertain terms: “Run home now, or you’ll be late. You can’t tell anyone what happened. If you ever tell your mother or anyone, the devil will punish your entire family!”

Wow! That kind of ended my belief in any kind of benevolent deity. So my search for a real meaning to my life began in earnest. When I was a disgruntled teenager (no wonder!) I asked my mother on a few occasions why the priest would have taken me into his bedroom. My mother would be so indignant when I brought up that subject that it took a lot of courage for me to break into such conversations. Her response was always to shrug and say that I must have seen the inside of the priest’s house from the vestry or gone in when my younger brothers were altar boys. Then, as I would try to relate the exact details to explain what had happened, she never listened, and always insisted that I was mistaken. Her religious beliefs blinded her to my plight, and our relationship became intolerable.

Something similar had happened when I was 6 years old, on my first sleepover at one of my classmate’s. Our moms were best friends; my mother was the choir leader at our little church in the village, and her mother sang alongside her. My friend’s father was one of the two village policemen, and he used to sit in his easy chair in the livingroom and shout out orders. During the night, as my friend and I lay asleep in her bed together, I woke up to find that her father was pulling me down to the foot of the bed. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me to go back to sleep. I watched as he pulled my girlfriend down, then I went back to sleep. In the morning, when my friend’s mother asked me how I slept, I told her that her husband had “come in and woke us up”. She dismissed my statement stating that he had just gone to use the bathroom. When my mother arrived to pick me up, I immediately told her about being awakened in the middle of the night, and the other woman looked at her and explained that he had just gone to use the bathroom.

As I grew into adulthood I always remembered these events vividly, but I never dealt with the emotional impact that they had on me. My mother, who was supposed to be my most trusted guardian, could only dismiss my allegations as some sort of imaginary concoction or misinterpretation of the events. As a result of my fear of reprisal from the church and my mother’s non-action, I learned to keep things to myself after that. Since these two very notable experiences had happened during my primary development years, I was hardly able to deal with them on my own. At home I was nicknamed “Gluck”, short for “Gloria the Suck”, because I was always crying for my mother.

As a result of my early childhood experiences, I was extremely shy. Although I was able to articulate my viewpoints with my close friends, I was unable to master any form of communication with groups. Instead, I would utter some silly phrase or out-of-context comment that would make others look at me strangely. As a teenager I decided that I wasn’t going to follow the path that everyone else was heading for. I couldn’t, because I had these terrible secrets, and felt I would never fit in. So I abandoned the ideals that had been presented to me as a child, and began to search for more meaning in my life. I felt there was something terribly hypocritical about the trappings of a so-called normal life, so I decided that I would seek that which was real. At least what was real to me.

I wanted to know about my purpose here. I didn’t want a fairy tale. Then at age fifteen, I had some of the most profound five minutes of my life, when I was presented with the seeds to my quest for substance in my existence.